Sticky Wicket is a Freeware (originally released as Shareware)
cricket game for DOS by
Mark
Carter. It plays a fictitious 40 over league with 8 teams in it.

When you start the game and have selected your team (for me that was
Worcestershire) you are presented with a menu with the following options

Continue Season - This will play your next match. When batting
you get an overhead view of the ground and see the bowler deliver the ball and the batsman
hopefully hit it. You have no control over this part. Once the ball is hit though you
control whether to run or not and how many to run. At first this will probably result in a
lot of run outs but you soon master the quick single. The only real criticism is that
there are only very few 2 and no opportunities to run 3. When bowling the computer simply
cycles through all his bowlers in 1 over spells which is unrealistic.

When bowling you have a choice of 5 fielding setting Orthodox, Defensive,
Attacking, Highly Attacking and Unorthodox. There is no option to define your own fields.
You select the next bowler to bowl and this time you only get the graphical view for
highlights (4s, 6s, missed chanced and wickets). You can only have 5 bowlers in a side but
the game is intelligent enough to prevent you bowling a bowler if it means one bowler
would be unable to complete his allocated 8 overs.

Result of games not involving your team are shown as a summary.

Change Team Selection - Allows you to select your team. You can
see Fitness, Batting, Bowling, Form and Overall ratings for your players. You team has to
be made up of 5 batsman, wicket keeper and 5 bowlers.

Fixture List - Displays upcoming fixtures.

League Table - Displays the current Sticky Wicket league table.

Career and Season Averages - You can view the batting and
bowling averages of any county in the league. You can also toggle between career and
season averages to see how well your players have performed for you.

Your Career Records - Shows your career performances compared
to other captains in the league.

Save/Restore Position - These options are disabled in the
shareware version.

Sticky Wicket is quite fun to play. I actually registered this program without
playing the shareware version as a result of reading a review in a magazine. The 2 player
version was quite fun as well as I shared a house with a friend who was also a big cricket
fan. For a long time this was the only shareware cricket program around. It may have
dated a little bit nowadays but still runs fine on today's much faster PCs.

The registration price of Sticky Wicket is £15. ** Update ** Sticky Wicket is
now Freeware. When you register you can play the full Sticky Wicket League with any 8
teams (288 players and all 18 counties are included) of your choosing. You can also play
in the Sticky Cup, save/restore your position. You also get a 2 player game of Sticky
Wicket to play against a friend (this 2 player game is missing from the new Freeware
release).